I have known Annamaria for many years and at first I had no idea that she was an artist. At that time I was working for the Educational Service of the Rome National Gallery (Galleria Nazionale) and Annamaria was one of the many professors who organized classes for students there. These students could sometimes be inattentive and unruly and it was hard work, especially in her case since she was obliged to teach adolescents between 12 and 15 years of age. While a class of students in elementary school can be introduced to a museum in an enjoyable manner, teaching a group of restless adolescents, accustomed to video games and television advertising, who are suddently confronted with a tutor of metaphysics or abstract art, with the minimum of hours that the Italian state school system dedicates to history of art, can prove to be an intolerable task. These young and innocent hooligans - many aspiring to become television starlets, who in a few years time would identify themselves with their favourite television celebrities, many young football supporters just back from a heated away match - usually came from some distant part of the country. Apart from the difficulties associated with their age, they often had the additional handicap of having been brought up in an anonymous suburb of the city with all its urban difficulties. However Annamaria never became discouraged, she reconciled the disagreements, she anticipated the problems and she examined them together with the students in the classroom. She also fought hard during the administrative meetings in order to be allowed to organize the maximum number of excursions possible and often to avoid administrative bureaucracy she would take twenty or thirty teenagers by metro "under her own responsibility", a phrase which most employees of the state administration fear like a biblical curse. Her students obviously adored her, we were a little frightened of her but at the same time we admired her. Tutors like her encourage students to appreciate museums and frequent them. That with the same passion, intensity and energy with which she taught she could also paint, still amazes me, and sometimes I suspect that, like a cat, she has nine lives and that she is able to live them all at the same time.

Obviously when there is a request to write a page about such a dynamic person it is impossible to refuse, and it was no good telling myself that normally I wrote pieces about artists who had concluded their career. I was used to searching the archives, studying the relevant documentation and researching their careers in a historical context. Therefore I must hazard some reflections - if Annamaria will allow me - which are formulated in the language of a historian, seeing that I am not a critic and am somewhat diffident of the language used by critics, having often read criticisms where a glittering sequence of learned and audacious adjectives graciously flow in endless succession.

In 1940 the Rector of the University of Padua, inaugurating the classrooms which had been decorated by the leading artists of that period: Martini, Campigli, Funi..... supported his choice of artists, considered by many local people to have been too audacious and innovative. He maintained that only posterity would allow a fair judgement regarding the true value of the work, since "with regard to contemporary art we all suffer from long-sightedness", it is too close for us to be able to judge its real value. "It will only come into focus" after time has put the appropriate distance between us and the work.

We are all aware of the fluctuations in tastes for art over time. We can take the example of the scandalized Eugenia, consort of Napoleon III, when she struck Manet's Olympia with her fan when it was first displayed in public in 1867. With this gesture she sanctified for future generations one of the masterpieces of Impressionist art but also demonstrated her incapacity - her own long-sightedness - to recognize this. The fact that the official critics of that time acclaimed a painter like Messonier, who is now practically forgotten, and that there were only a few dissolute geniuses like Zola who supported the Impressionists, justifies the gesture of poor Eugenia and it is also a warning for many obliging critics. Therefore I will just dedicate a few precise words to the work of Annamaria which go beyond my personal admiration for the unshakeable physical energy that she invests in her art. Others, more directly qualified, will analyze her work on these pages. Meticulous craftsmanship and an expert hand resulting from her years of training at the Academy, have supported her punctilious development resulting in the harmony of her particular form of abstract expressionism. Matter has become the main element of her work. Matter - sand from the river - to which she is linked by tender memories of a childhood safeguarded by the constant presence of a mother who used to take her everywhere, in the fields, to the river bed. This sand of diverse grains, the living body of her painting, painting where over the years matter has become the main element, progressively transforming the canvas into a support for a sort of foaming high relief sculpture, always more solid, always more structured. In addition there is the skilful play of dissection and reassembling that Annamaria uses on her canvasses, composing triptychs and polyptychs, sequences on the walls, not binding or bound, but just influenced by an arrangement of her palette which is, at the same time, turbulent and delicate.

I believe in Annamaria since I know how much work she has already undertaken and how much she still wants to achieve.